Minimum Requirements

The minimum recommended hardware requirements to run HEC-WAT 1.1 in a Windows 11 environment are:

  • 64-bit x86 processor with 4 cores (minimum) with additional cores recommended for some applications such as HEC-RAS and HEC-HMS.
  • 4 gigabytes of RAM (minimum), recommend additional RAM for most applications.
  • 1.9 gigabytes of storage space for the HEC-WAT program,
  • Additional storage space for models on the local machine.  The size of a HEC-WAT study ("watershed") and model outputs will vary significantly.  For a smaller model, less than a gigabyte of storage may be sufficient, while large studies may need hundreds of gigabytes of storage.  We strongly recommend against running a HEC-WAT model stored on a network drive as it will create performance issues.
  • Display: Screen resolution of at least 1366 x 768 as a minimum, however some elements of the HEC-WAT's user interface may require a 1920 x 1080 ("Full HD") resolution or higher when editing HEC-WAT models.  "High DPI" displays may require software specific settings for some UI elements render correctly.

Requirements for Specific Modeling Applications

While HEC-WAT itself does not require substantial resources, it can be used to run various hydrologic and hydraulic engineering software that may have more substantial requirements.  For an existing model, the hardware requirements to run and use that specific model, as well as the computational time required, are expected to remain similar when used within an HEC-WAT study. For an example tutorial that helps you estimate the computation time for a simulation, please review the FRA Compute Time (HEC-WAT Tutorials and Guides).

Note: The HEC-WAT "Flood Risk Analysis" Nested Monte Carlo feature will run these models thousands of times or more, and so a user should plan to optimize their model for fast computational times when applying this feature.  Without enabling additional features within HEC-WAT, the compute time and storage requirement for these single-event model will scale approximately linearly with the number of events required.

HEC-WAT Distributed Compute

HEC-WAT allows for a distributed compute option that allows sending individual compute jobs out to a network of machines or compute nodes.  In addition to a network connection between machines capable of sustaining a moderate amount of data transfer (such as gigabit-speed ethernet or better), each compute node will need similar resources to those needed to run the HEC-WAT model on a single computer.